I’m working with the hard working crew at Getprice Comparison Shopping and working with them on building out their service.
One of the things we’ve been doing is designing a registered customer service, where you can join Getprice and get tools, stuff and things that make your ongoing shopping experience better.
As part of this, I was a good boy and looked at the competitors and saw that none of them are doing this well. There are social shopping sites that have registered users, but the straight comparison shopping sites are straight turnstiles.
Straight Turnstile: Customer finds you (SEM, SEO, Affiliate generally), uses you, leaves you and you take a CPC clip on the way out and maybe some CPM on the way through. Other than a few cookies and a number on the stats pile, you don’t really know anything about them.
Hugging Turnstile: Customer finds you (however), uses you and in the process of using you decide they like you and would like to form a permanent (but light to begin with) connection. They may then leave you by the same means as the straight turnstile, but we know who they are, can talk to them if need be and when they come back, you can start building on the relationship.
Obviously I’m a Hugging kinda guy, so I was struck wondering whether the friction of offering the hug, regardless of how good the value is and how well you place it, is too expensive a cost on the speed of the turnstile?
i.e. Is it better not to have a registration option to keep it simple and just let them flow.
This is sort of like the ‘don’t show any nav options in the shopping cart process’ principle. Keep them moving down the funnel and they’ll go where you want them to.
What do you think?
Popularity: 10% [?]
2 responses so far ↓
1 alan jones // May 29, 2008 at 7:06 pm
It’s a tricky question because probably the answer will depend on the service and “how good the hug is” - how much value there is in pausing the sales process to register.
Frinstance, at Homescreen Entertainment (DVD rental service) we found there was little we could offer (rate DVDs, get recommendations, receive newsletter) and after a lot of testing decided to offer even our ratings/recommendations feature without requiring registration.
Users could go all the way to the end of the process of signing up to rent DVDs without a registration. In testing different signup points in the new user path we found we could get a measurable increase in conversion from visitor to registered one month trial customer this way.
For a biz like Getprice I’d say most of the “hey we recognise you from last visit and here’s your personalised page of products” could be built using cookies, and the signup moment could be left to the moment of CPC. Leave the option to login/signup at top right of nav so its always there if someone wants a hug right away.
2 Bart Jellema // Jun 3, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Unless you provide a compelling reason for users to sign up, it’s going to cost more than you get from it in my opinion. On tjoos.com we only require sign-up if there is a reason for it, such as notifications. For GetPrice this could be a price-drop notification.
Some shopping related sites that have done this successfully are the cash-back services such as EBates and large forums such as fatwallet and slickdeals. For this to work on price comparison I think you will need features equal to sites like Kaboodle, StyleHive or StyleFeeder.
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